I have always written my requests in English and yet, for my latest request, the replies are coming in French, with the formal salutation of “Madame Carter” instead of the usual “Joanna”.
Compare that with my previous request, where Fabrice replied using “Dear Joanna”, “Hi Joanna” and “Hello Joanna”
Where did they get the idea that I understood French?
I did “Gee” the courtesy of translating my reply into French, but would have much rather have used English, especially on technical subjects.
There is something about the content of their replies that has that “uncanny valley” feeling about them, where I am not sure that I am talking to a machine.
The paragraphs seem to be template text cobbled together rather than human-written.
Their latest reply contains ten paragraphs of stock text that talk about downloading, installing and running the diagnostics tool and zipping up the resulting reports to send to them - even though I have never reported a crash and, thus, no diagnostics have been generated.
Has HAL 9000 now taken over? Who can ever forget that chilling line from the film “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”
Could it simply be that they might have some support staff which are not fluent in written English and therefore translate to French.
Or they read English but reply in French which then is translated to English - but this time it did not?
And some support tools do have automatic adding of know support articles or instructions.
This has now happened twice but, as I said, all previous interactions have been totally in English.
Also and more importantly, the writing style is nowhere near as “human” as it used to be, which is much more worrying than just the choice of language.
I have replied, stating my concern that “Gee” might be another HAL
Oh great! No wonder they switched to the new reporting mechanism for beta tests as well.
If PL9 wasn’t so good for some things, I would definitely stop giving my money to DxO. After all, I assumed DxO were employing real people to code but, can we still be of that? Or does AI coding explain the steady decline in release version quality?
The only problem is that so many companies have fallen down this rabbit hole that it’s not worth switching. Or is it?
Just received a message insisting on a diagnostic report. The only trouble is, that can only report a single state. So, how on earth can that be useful when the effect is only noticeable when viewed as a sequence of eight random changes?
Eight diagnostics?
This sounds very much like a predetermined script that has to be followed before a real person actually gets to see it for themselves.
A bit like the security guard at Manchester Airport who insisted that I could only take two out of the three items (clothing bag, computer case and handbag). through for scanning. In the end, I stuffed my handbag into the front compartment of the computer bag and the minion deemed herself, grudgingly, satisfied.
On reaching the scanning desk, the inspector asked me to separate the bags and expressed his disdain for the idiot who told me to combine them. Meaning intelligence doesn’t have to be artificial to be downright dumb.
Just noticed Gee’s latest message was sent at 6h14, Paris time. Call me cynical but that looks like he is situated in Eastern Europe. Outsourcing anyone ?
Quite a while ago, DxO published a photo of a get-together of the folks that work wherever they live. Those people seemed to have contracts with DxO, but not necessarily a desk.
In France, companies have adopted no-desk policies many (many) years ago. I remember having read about it in a respectable newspaper. They mentioned financial benefits for the company and risk of isolation issues for employees. Including people from abroad takes the model one step further, but such models seem to be fairly standard in many companies nowadays.
It doesn’t really matter where people are, as long as pay and services provided are balanced and on a satisfactory level.
Other than that, “tech” companies tend to neglect quality of interaction with customers or push supporters to deliver high quality in no time, which is - how come - not working.
As far as I’m concerned, I mostly get answers that seem to make sense. Occasionally, I’m also asked for a diagnostic report and have come to add one to almost all of the tickets I open . But sometimes, DPL terrorises the system in a way that prohibits creating a report and in those cases, I’d prefer to get instructions on how to create a report under these conditions instead of a friendly “report, please”.
All in all, I’ve come to live with what I get because that is the relation (EULA), but the ways here are quite different to the standard for support in the financial services company I worked before retiring.
I know what you mean as I too come from financial services. But even that was changing and has changed rapidly. We pushed first class operations out to places like India to make savings. The argument that this would inevitably bring operational issues and financial losses was ignored on the basis that operating out of India was so cheap it would cover those sort of costs easily and without significant impact to the bottom line. The interface with the client remained in the UK (the birth of the Help Desk) and clients were speaking to people who had no hands on operational experience. It would have been catastrophic had it not been for the fact that most businesses climbed on the same band wagon. Service standards now “suck” generally but that is the price paid when containing costs.
I had the same problem. I sent a reply, asking that they change my language to English and…I still needed to send more asking for them to please read their requests and commitments to fix the problem.
I don’t recall one showing up in French lately so, perhaps they got the idea.
